Massacre in Juarez

Information is still sketchy at this point, but Diario de Juarez and all other Mexican media are reporting that a dozen armed — and masked — gunmen entered a Juarez drug rehabilitation clinic, lined up somewhere around a twenty of the young male residents whose names were on a list the gun men had, and shot them.

In a  Navolato last week, eight young men, suspected of ties to auto theft rings, were also gunned down, as have another 36 in Culiacán over the past several months.

There’s a tendency to claim all criminal activity is somehow related to the U.S. backed “War on Drugs”, and given that police and security activities in Sinaloa and along the border are over-focused on the big time gangsters, I suppose there is some justification in that assumption.  And, it’s plausible that the highly organized cartels are moving (with extreme violence) into the stolen car market, but that doesn’t quite explain the murders in Juarez.

If I remember correctly, there was another massacre about a year ago at another drug rehab in Juarez, so I’ve discounted my first thought that murdering recovering addicts (and presumably small time narcotics dealers) might be a reaction to liberalized possession laws which should cut into the profits of retail narcotics dealers, and force the cartels to cut their payroll… i.e.,  the penny-ante dealers.

Several Mexican media reports note that the drug rehab in Juarez is only a couple of blocks from a police station, which makes me more and more lean towards the theory that because crime control has been focused only on one area (narcotics exporters) other criminals, organized or otherwise, are taking advantage of the situation… or that death squads are taking advantage of the justice system’s distraction to settle differences.